If you've read Neil Stephenson's grand, sprawling, gargantuan novel, you
know that there are some real people in the story - Alan Turing, for
example. There are also characters based more or less loosely on real
people. This note identifies one of them, and gives a bit of the
history of the man, one who played a significant part in the history of
World War II that runs through the novel.

Even if you haven't read it - and if you haven't, the connection here
won't mean much - I think you'll be fascinated by his story, and by the
glimpse into a little-known aspect of World War II: how U. S. Navy
cryptologists broke a Japanese naval code, and in the process, helped
turn the tide of the war in the Pacific.

Let's start by picking up the thread in Cryptonomicon where he first appears. There
are actually two threads that come together here: the first is one of
the main characters, L. P. Waterhouse. He is a naive young man who
turns out to be a mathematical genius, and who enlists in the Navy
at the beginning of World War II. We first see our subject in the book through his
eyes, and he provides a few of the details that tie this all together.

When he took the Navy intelligence test, Waterhouse saw such interesting
possibilities in one of the questions that he made a significant advance in
an obscure area of math, one that led to his getting a paper published in a European
journal. But because he didn't finish the rest of the test, the Navy
concluded that he must be pretty dim. They assigned him to a Navy band
unit. (Present and former Naval people will probably recognize this
sort of thing. It happens now and again in the military.)

A short time later, he's on deck, at Pearl Harbor, on a sunny Sunday
morning in 1941, in the band, practicing, playing the glockenspiel. (I
think Stephenson just liked the sound of that word.)

After the attack, the need for navy bandsmen had somewhat dwindled,
and the need for clerks, typists and filers had appreciably increased.
Waterhouse and his fellow bandsmen found themselves transferred to a new unit.

It is here that he met the object of our interest, the second thread in this story.
This second thread is the man loosely based
on an actual Navy Commander. Here's how L. P. Waterhouse first sees
him, in Cryptonomicon:

"...he sees that the officer (if he even is an officer) is out
of uniform. Way out of uniform. He's wearing a bathrobe and
smoking a pipe. The bathrobe is extrordinarily worn... The thing
hasn't been laundered in a long time, but boy has it seen some
use. The elbows are worn out and the bottom of the
right sleeve is ashy grey and slippery with graphite from being
dragged back and forth, tens of thousands of times, across sheets of
paper dense with number-two pencil work.
...
Some other fellow ... introduces bathrobe man as Commander Schoen..."

Stephenson, "Cryptonomicon", p. 67

Those are our two threads: a sailor pulled out of a band unit into a codes
and signals unit, and the
Commander of that unit, who wears a bathrobe and slippers, smokes a
pipe, and looks a little disheveled.

The Commander could be a product of Stephenon's wild imagination, but he
isn't. At least, not entirely.

People who have studied the history of U. S. Naval cryptography would
probably recognize "Commander Schoen" as an exaggeration of Commander Joe
Rochefort, USN. (Apparently Rochefort appears "in several disguises"
throughout the book, but this is the only one I've found so far.) For
the rest of us, though - and I found this story only recently - here are
the details about the real-life inspiration for the character.

There's a fine book by Michael Smith,
The Emperor's Codes: The Breaking of Japan's Secret
Ciphers, from
which we can pull out the thread that is Rochefort. In a way, his story
is an example of the adage that "no good deed goes unpunished"
(another thing that may strike a familiar chord with present and former
Naval personnel).

Smith picks up the story of Cmdr Rochefort. He was born in Dayton, OH, in 1898.
He enlisted in the navy in 1918 and was later commissioned as an officer.
In 1925, he was head of the US Navy cryptologic section. He took over
the Pearl Harbor crypto unit in June 1941.

There's a photo of Cmdr Rochefort in the center section of the book.
The photo is credited to the NSA. The NSA has a "Hall of Honor", paying tribute to the
pioneers and heroes of American cryptology. The Hall is subtitled "These Were the Giants".
Cmdr Rochefort's page is
here.

"...for...3 months Rochefort rarely left the office.
He slept there, ate
there, kept going by US Navy-issue amphetamines, and even when
working was invariably seen wearing a silk smoking jacket and
slippers."

[Rochefort] said

"I ... put in 20 or 22 hours per day ... for about 48 hours at a
stretch... I started to wear a smoking jacket over the uniform...
it [kept] me warm... it had pockets where I could keep my pouch
and pipe. Then my feet got sore from the concrete floor... So I
started wearing slippers because the shoes hurt my feet."

Smith, pp108-109

One more detail:

"So urgent was the need for reinforcements, Rochefort recalled
having to recruit navy bandsmen to operate his punched-card
machines..."

What happened next?

For the next few years, Rochefort's unit intercepted and decoded thousands of
Japanese navy messages. Perhaps the high point of the unit was in June of 1942, just before the
Battle of Midway.

Rochefort was sure, based on the messages he processed, that the Japaese fleet would attack at
Midway. The admirals in Washington were convinced that it would be somewhere else,
either Alaska, Hawaii, or even the West Coast.
He managed to convince Admiral Nimitz, who sent the fleet to Midway. The Pacific Fleet
won that decisive battle, one of the most important of the war.
The admirals in Washington were sore losers, particularly
the Redmon brothers:

"Safford had been replaced as head of OP-20-G
[The Naval Cryptography division,
of which Rochefort's unit was a part] ...
by Cmdr John Redman, brother of Director of Naval Communications,
Rear Admiral Joseph Redman. The Redman brothers were determined to
ensure that communications experts were in charge of naval
codebreaking. John Redman also appears to have resented being made
to feel foolish by Rochefort over the Midway disagreement. Word
began to spread within the naval hierarchy ... that the naval
intelligence center in Hawaii was not working well and Rochefort
was to blame. The esoteric codebreaker with a penchant for wearing
a silk smoking jacket over his uniform was never likely to go over
well with the tub-thumping Redman brothers. ... John Redman
complained to his superiors that the Hawaii codebreaking operation
was in the hands of a man who was merely "an ex-Japanese-language
student".

Rochefort was replaced and sent back to San Francisco where he was
put in charge of a new dry dock. Philip Jacobsen wrote, "What a
waste of priceless talent for a political payback. Nimitz's
recommendation for the Distinguished Service Medal was twice
denied, but given to political cronies of the Redmans in
Washington."

Smith, pp143-4

"The Pearl Harbor codebreaking operation that Rochefort put in
place was one of the most efficient operating anywhere,... the
breaking of Yamamoto's operational orders prior to the Battle of
Midway was a truly spectacular success.

Rochefort, who retired from the navy in 1953, never did receive the
Distinguished Service Medal that Admiral Nimitz had recommended him
for in the wake of Midway, but it was belatedly awarded to him
posthumously in 1986.

Smith, p227

He died in 1976. According to the NSA site, the award was the
President's National Defense Service Medal, the highest military award during peacetime.

Starting points for further exploration

There are, of course, thousands of references and books about the subjects of
cryptography and war. These few are the ones I came across in searching out this story.
I'll add more later.

Philip H. Jacobsen, LCDR, USN, (Ret.) has an excellent site,
(The Codebreakers).
The section about Cmdr Rochefort is
here.

There is an association of US Navy cryptologic veterans, which has a journal,
"Cryptolog, the Journal of the US Naval Cryptologic Veterans
Association" www.usncva.org/clog/
Smith got a lot of his information from this site. Click on their link "Fetaures"
to read a set of naval interviews with Rochefort, done in 1969.